1,092 Quotes by Salman Rushdie

…Shakespeare is both my door knocker and the owner of the domains to which the knock admits me, at once my Virgil opening the gates of hell and heaven, and the devil, and God, and I say this as a person who believes in neither God nor the devil, I believe only in Virgil…

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

We, for our own part, simply call ourselves "we." "We" are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.

These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.

How do you behave when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute: what then?

The past is a broken cardboard suitcase full of photographs of things I no longer wish to see.